The popularity of Political Discourse Analysis has attracted many metaphor researchers to study metaphor use in framing political perspectives. Still, one fundamental research question remains as to how metaphoricity changes in political discourse.
This book focuses on the understudied U.S.-China trade discourses, which specifically concern trade relationships in the Clinton-Jiang era (1993-1997) and the Trump-Xi era (2017-2021). Based on a large governmental corpus of about 6,000,000 words, this book presents the first transdisciplinary investigation of metaphoricity change in U.S.-China trade discourse, from both static and dynamic perspectives. While offering a systematic protocol of cross-linguistic metaphor identification, the static view captures changes in source domains and verbal metaphors across time, languages, and political genres. Outlining a new transdisciplinary model of YinYang Dynamics of Metaphoricity, the dynamic view examines the nature, feature, form, pattern, and function of metaphoricity activation in governmental texts. Besides its cognitive linguistic and corpus linguistic approaches, this research also adopts angles of Critical Discourse Analysis, international relations, and political history. From multidisciplinary perspectives, it investigates the political implications of metaphoricity change, thus shedding light on U.S.-China trade interactions.
This book will appeal to anyone interested in variations of political metaphors in governmental discourse. It is also a helpful source for those who are concerned with theoretical and methodological explorations in political metaphor research. As the first multidisciplinary work on both metaphoricity change and discourse of international relations, this book will attract readers who are keen to understand the relationship between metaphoricity transformation and global political society.